79: Nick Lowe, "Cruel to Be Kind"

By Wm. on September 30, 2025

Once Mark Seaman and I agreed to "debate" the merits of AT40 lists from the 70s and 80s (now over four years ago), there was the matter of making my first selection for discussion. I elected to use a random number generating website to help. Initially we were limiting ourselves to charts between 1976 and 1985, so I first had it pick a number between 1 and 10 for the year--1976 being coded to 1--and then 1 and 51 for the week. The results were 4 and 38, which translated to 9/22/79. (Mark offered up 12/6/80, I think also via a passive process.) There may be been a bit of trepidation going into that first confab--what if this person with whom I share interests doesn't like me? etc., etc.--but once it became clear that wide divergences of opinion wouldn't be taken personally in the least, all fear dissipated. And great differences emerged from the get-go, as I think we started with the '79 list:

We always begin with our respective #40s and work our way to the top (like any self-respecting Casey-phile should). By the time we reached our #35 songs, we'd both picked off two from the other's Top 10 (I snagged MJ and G.Q., while Mark got Warnes and Night). Just three tunes in common in the Top 10 has turned out to be a below average number.

A couple of quick comments:
--It would be three years, until "Truly," that I liked a Lionel Richie-penned song as much as I dug "Sail On." (I feel certain that I've commented before how much I loathe both "Lady" and "Endless Love.")
--I think I would have ranked all of "Hot Summer Nights," "Don't Bring Me Down," and "Pop Muzik" higher in real time--I'd bought the 45s for the first and third of those, and would purchase Discovery before the end of the year.

While "My Sharona" wins out as our collective favorite, Nick Lowe's one U.S. Top 40 hit is a clear-cut second. "Cruel to Be Kind" momentarily looked like it would make the Top 10, as it's jumping eight spots to #13 on this show. Three weeks at #12 followed before a quick tumble off the Hot 100, however. If I saw its video during MTV's heyday, the clips from Lowe's wedding to Carlene Carter, which took place a month prior to this chart date, didn't register; it would take over a decade for me to realize Lowe helped produce a couple of Carter's early 80s records.

Since that first meet-up, my proposals for discussions with Mark have all been intentionally chosen. At this point, we are coming close to running out of temporal real estate from the original ten-year period without encountering a lot of previously discussed songs. We've yet to tackle the summer of '79, though--a week from mid-June will come under the microscope when we meet next.